FAQ: battery

The ruuvi tag has been distributed with a 3 volt, 950mAh CR2477 battery (since mm.dd.yy) with an environmental operating range of -40 to +85°C.

There is a very concerted effort that the distributed software use little power. As of version 2.2.2 the average current is less than 20uA. At 23°C lifetime is expected to be greater than 1 year.

Theoretical current usage for the nRF52832 radio itself is 5.3mA when transmitting at 0dBm, adding the peripherals needed to run the radio brings the requirement up to 7.1mA. Keeping the system idle most of the time significantly reduces the average current requirements.

Additional current is used by the environmental sensor(temperature, humidity and air pressure) and accelerometer.

Nordic has a Online Power Profiler which estimates the current consumed during data exchange. This can be used to demonstrate the effect of various configurations. For example at 4dBm with an interval of 100ms the total average current is 160uA. Reducing the interval to 1000ms reduces the average current to 10uA as you should expect.

The nRF52832 specifications recommend a 3.6 to 1.7 volt supply. (although not used as of 10/11/18, It provides brownout warnings at tenth volt variations from 2.8 to 1.7.)

The temperature/humidity/air-pressure sensor used is a BME280 which requires a VDD main supply voltage range: 3.6 to 1.71 and VDDIO interface voltage range: 3.6 to 1.2.

Most Lithium / Manganese Dioxide (Li/MnO2, CR prefix) batteries start at just over 3.00V and drop to 3.00 within several hours after load is applied. They continue to output 3.00 volt slowly dropping to 2.7 for months (depending on temperature) with the as distributed ruuvi software. At some point they drop rapidly to 2.00 volts and then stop outputting. Self-discharge is less than 1% per year at 23°C. Shelf life is up to 10 years at max. 23°C.

The size of a CR2450 battery is 24mm diameter with a height of 5.0mm.

Of course not using a coin battery and using another 3 Volt battery or other source is always a possibility. Including pairing LiFeS2 AA 1.5V. See

Informative graphs at Renata Design Guide

Effects of temperature Energizer lithium coin (be sure to scroll down to the correct type battery).

The battery shipped with the kickstart shipments was the 490mAh CR2450HT